The Lovely Bones

I’m warning you now: this is going to hurt. It’s going to sting and be unforgiving, and I apologize to those of you who love this novel, because I know the number of those who do is large. The reason why I chose this novel was because so many of my dear friends enjoyed it.

I, however, hated it.

I should preface this review with the acknowledgement that I have hated Alice Sebold since freshman year of college when I read Lucky, sprawled across my extra-long twin mattress in my dorm room. No writer has ever infuriated me like she did then. But give The Lovely Bones a try, many of you said. You’ll feel differently about her, you said. I’m always willing to give second chances. I am going out with One again, even after he called my best friend my “home girl” and sent me a link to a porn site last night. (For the record, I’m doing my best to get out of our second date tomorrow. I’m hoping the fact that he is getting sick will force a reschedule, which will give me plenty of room to stop talking to him altogether.)

After seeing the preview for the movie, which, while slightly typical in the Peter Jackson panoramic cinematography kind of way, looked pretty intriguing, I committed to a paperback copy of the book. When I read the blue-covered book it in the right light, the sun shining in between the window frame and the white blinds would reflect the blue off of the cover and onto the white bedspread on which I lay.

That was the only part of this book that I found to be beautiful.

I’m going to try my best to not get nitpicky and nasty. Snarky, you will all have to deal with, but I’ll skip right past my building desire to rip apart the novel from the first page (um, why is there an epigraph that is not really an epigraph and should most definitely be a paragraph IN the book, not BEFORE the book?).

Sorry. The rage Sebold ignites in me is a long and complicated one.

Ok, I’ll tell you. Have you ever read Lucky? Well, I hope not. I hope none of you waste the money on such an egotistical, bullying know-it-all. Lucky is Sebold’s memoir about being the victim of rape. Although, she would probably rip my head off for referring to her as a “victim.” (Hi, get over it.) But this is what really irked me: in the book she details (in detail!) the experience of a good friend of hers who is also raped. Certainly the details of the rape are very different from Sebold’s: she was raped brutally by a stranger, and her friend was date raped by someone she knew. I get it: rape is rape. Trust me, if anyone has struggled inwardly and outwardly with this concept it is I. Seriously. But just as grief is different (and from a very young age I was taught that you cannot judge how people deal with grief), so is trauma. It is no one’s business how one deals with the ramifications of being raped. It is not your place or mine to tell them what to do or how to act. That’s my opinion.

Apparently that’s not Sebold’s. In her memoir she criticizes her friend within its pages and to her face for not pressing charges against her assailant. Maybe I should be more understanding and see this as a symptom of Sebold’s own trauma manifesting itself in fervent anger towards her friend, but this uproar ended their friendship as I remember it, and Sebold showed, even years later upon writing her memoir, no regret for her unyielding, unsympathetic, and downright unfriendly behavior.

How about a little understanding?

This is all I remember of that novel. I remember being outraged and wanting to slam the book into her self-righteous face.

So, there it is: my real beef with Sebold. Maybe now I can continue on in an objective manner?

Doubtful.

Let me first go into what I enjoyed about the novel. I’d hate to follow up that rant with a bulleted list of everything that I hated, which, by the way, is currently hand-written on a page in my Filofax, ready to be elaborated upon.

I did enjoy the understated nature of the crime novel within the pages of this story. It was never overstated to the point of being trashy or predictable (like the rest of the novel, ah HEM). It felt more like a sleeping lion in the corner, left on its own and only occasionally mentioned in the details of the crime itself and the inner-workings of, and flashbacks in, Harvey’s mind. The chapter in which Sebold details the childhood recollections of Harvey and his mother is original and strikingly told, but the connection between his memories and the sickness in his adulthood is a little too thin to see explicitly. But I’m not a psychiatrist. Just an angry reader. Of course some of the details of Harvey’s symptoms, or how his unstable mind manifested itself, are predictable: killing animals, his first time raping a girl to be an accident, he claims: “It was as if something outside of him had resulted in the collision of their two bodies one afternoon” (292). Although, I suppose a lot of criminal behavior is predictable and unoriginal. It just doesn’t make for a compelling character.

There were also elements of vengeance that were left dangling at the end of the novel. Susie, so determined to protect her family and guide them towards her killer, found it more important to make love to a boy she loved at twelve years old when she did “come back to life” (more on this bullshit later) than she did to direct them towards where her killer was still stalking after other young girls. And then for Harvey to (SPOILER ALERT!!!) simply fall down a slope and die so unceremoniously seemed like all too convenient a way of dealing with the crime aspects of the novel. It certainly wasn’t an earned ending or death. More likely it was an easy way to wrap up the pesky issue of a serial rapist and killer on the loose in a pretty pink bow. One with jingle bells dangling from the ends, perhaps?

I did enjoy how intelligent the children in the book were. The adults were certainly thinking characters, but the extent of their respective depths was not as thoroughly plumbed as the depth of the young characters. The adults seemed selfish and stubbornly stuck, while the children were the ones who carried, and carried on under, the grief: Lindsey taking on the role of wife and mother, and Ruth taking on the responsibilities of channeling Susie and the dead. We learn early on that the sister, Lindsey, is labeled as gifted: “But once called gifted, it had spurred her on to live up to the name. She locked herself in her bedroom and read big books. When I read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, she read Camus’s Resistance, Rebellion, and Death” (32). And even Susie, who downplays her own intelligence, falls for a boy quite above his grade-level as far as literature is concerned: “’I like Othello,’ I ventured. ‘It’s condescending twaddle the way she teaches it. A sort of Black Like Me version of the Moor’” (74). Or Ruth who challenges her puritanical teachers when they question her detailed nude drawing from a sexless, wooden figure in class: “’If I’m not mistaken,’ said Miss Ryan, ‘there are no breasts on our anatomy model.”… ‘There isn’t a nose or mouth on that wooden model either,’ Ruth said, ‘but you encouraged us to draw in faces’” (76). The steady, determined brightness of the children seems to throw into greater relief the nonsense of the adults. From this point of view, Sebold achieves her greatest success in the novel.

There were also some strikingly cinematic moments where the narrator pulled away from specific scenes to show what all of the characters were doing in their specific points of grief: “While Len took her hand and brought her away from the wall into the tangle of pipes where the noise overhead added its chorus, Mr. Harvey began to pack his belongings; my brother met a small girl playing Hula-Hoop in the circle; my sister and Samuel lay beside each other on her bed, fully dressed and nervous; my grandmother downed three shots in the empty dining room. My father watched the phone” (196). I imagine these moments will fit flawlessly into Peter Jackson’s vision for the movie. I’m eager to see whether or not he translates them literally into his adaptation.

Ok, can we get a little cutting now? After reading the entire novel, all I can help thinking is that this is an exact confluence of the movie Ghost and the book The Deep End of the Ocean. It is practically the EXACT same story of Mitchard’s book: lost child, grieving and distant mother has affair with police officer assigned to the case, father clings to maintaining the family life and finding the answers to child’s disappearance, and surviving children suffer because of it. I read this book when I was in middle school, folks. It wasn’t good, certainly not good enough to be rewritten and repackaged as something worthy of a literary following a decade later. Admittedly, Sebold’s story is more skillfully told with better language, more compelling characters, and an insight into grief that does not exist The Deep End, in which the lost child is returned halfway through the novel, ending the similarities between the two stories. But it is one thing to be Jacquelyn Mitchard and sell yourself as a trashy beach read, but to put on writerly airs and write the same story? It’s offensive. And, while I was told that the idea of heaven in this book was beautiful and original, I found it to be flat and predictable: a voyeuristic, perfect place where you get everything you ask for and where you can channel yourself into the bodies of the living (an extremely baffling, confusing, eye-roll worthy part of the story). Most of us have seen Ghost; we’ve seen the idea of the dead watching over the living, trying to solve the crime that lead to their demise, trying to protect their loved ones, and somehow shifting into the bodies of those characters who are capable of channeling the dead.

What bothered me more than the predictably of heaven and death, was the predictably of the grief that each family member experienced. Are you serious with this shit, Sebold? Have you ever known a family who has lost a child? The story of this family is the stuff of soap operas and, well, trashy novels (see above reference to the Jacquelyn Mitchard novel I bought at Costco when I was thirteen). Grief is such an individual and original experience. It is never the same. I’ve never known one sibling to grieve like the next over a lost sister or brother. I’ve never known a best friend to grieve the way another one does. One of the things that makes grief so unbelievably beautiful (if I may say that) is how unique it is in everyone who experiences it. It’s this aspect of grief that makes it a compelling topic, but also a complicated one. And, while no member of the Salmon family experiences Susie’s death the same way as the other, the way in which each experiences it as a father, a mother, a sister, and a brother is extremely stereotypical. I imagine, if Sebold did any research at all (which I highly doubt), it was to read a Psych 101 textbook and call it a day. The father who channels his grief into finding his daughter’s killer, the mother who detaches and feels her daughter’s death is a punishment for never wanting her in the first place, the sister who grows up too quickly, tackling sex far too young as a way of feeling alive amidst death, and the little brother who struggles for attention growing up in a household broken by the death of his sister. Come on, right? Grief is not stereotypical. It is not predictable. Each person’s grief is not, in any way, similar to any grief that has been felt before. I resent Sebold trying to write grief in a way that is a disservice to the poignancy of the losing a loved one.

And as long as I’m being entirely unrelenting, let me just mention how much I began to despise Sebold’s use of “killer” ending lines. You know those lines with all the literary punch of a poem? They ended chapters, they ended sections. Find an ending in the book and you’ll find a so-called “killer” line:

“Our house looked the same as every other one on the block, but it was not the same. Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone” (206).

“I left them in the rain and darkness. I wondered if Lindsey noticed that when she and Samuel began to unzip their leathers the lightning stopped and the rumble in the throat of God—that scary thunder—ceased” (237).

“He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity” (261).

“And I thought of the mix of air that was our front yard, which was daylight, a queasy mother and a cop—it was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day a question mark” (299).

“’He took out a loan on his business to buy up old places that aren’t already slated for destruction. He wants to restore them,’ Ray said.
‘My God,’ Samuel said.
And I was gone” (322).

This last one kills me. IT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE! Why does this moment of all moments lead to her leaving her family behind to continue on to heaven? It’s terribly written, and it’s a terrible line to lead to her departure from the inbetween. There are so many moments that are lost on Sebold, so many opportunities for originality that fall, helplessly, into cheesiness.

Look, I love a powerful line like nobody’s business. I spent my early twenties trying to write good poetry (failing miserably, I might add) that had the power to make you feel everything in one line. But I sucked at it, and when Sebold ends every damn section or chapter with a “powerful” line, most of which are meaningless and there only for dramatic effect, they lose their effect! It becomes predictable. Does she really think we’re stupid enough to gasp at her nonsensical sentences when they pop up on every page? No. Instead, we roll our eyes as we approach the end of a chapter or a break in the page and think, “What’s it going to be this time?”

And, while we’re on all things cheesy, I’ll leave you with the one mention of the title (unless you want to actually approach it in an intelligent way and suggest the lovely bones are about the ones that are buried in Harvey’s basement and the sinkhole and the dug out shed where he has kept his victims). But beware, it’s just as insultingly cheesy and predictable as her other attempts at intelligent writing:

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. That price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life” (320).

Say cheese!

CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!

I give it one star out of five. (This rating is under the assumption that I am allowed to give a book zero stars out of five. There is, after all, an inkling of redemption floating around within its pages.)